SEO: Dealing with the Perfect Storm

If your website is hit by Panda and Penguin, what would you do? Suppose you had to face Googleâ€™s manual penalties too? Donâ€™t worry â€“ itâ€™s not the end of the world. There are stories of websites that have dealt with the perfect storm. An experienced SEO company would know what to do to help your business website bounce back.

A Real Life Experience to Inspire You

Hereâ€™s a real life story of a website that was hit by this perfect storm and got back on its feet with the help of professional SEO services.

The website had been experiencing some instability when it suddenly faced a significant drop in traffic and search engine rankings following the Penguin and Panda updates. To make matters worse, even before their SEO Company could take any action, they received Googleâ€™s dreaded notification about non-conformance to its quality guidelines, resulting in a manual penalty.

In its notification, Google mentioned the presence of large number of artificial or unnatural links to the website aimed at manipulating PageRank. Google cited taking part in link schemes or purchasing links to pass PageRank as the factors that could be responsible for the unnatural linking.

Treading a Difficult Path

The search engine optimization company had to work long and hard to restore the websiteâ€™s online ranking. The first step involved removing the unnatural links â€“ a process easier said than done and one which took the better part of four months. Email messages were sent to all the site owners that hosted the low quality backlinks. All such link cleansing attempts and communication were documented to prove to Google that steps had been taken to adhere to its quality standards.

Not all requests to webmasters to remove the backlinks were successful. Some requests were rejected while some webmasters asked for money to remove the links! All these activities were documented and the reports sent to Google. Googleâ€™s Disavow tool was used to handle the negative algorithmic effect of the inorganic links.

Google Replies

Following the second reconsideration request, Google accepted the website but warned that the rankings and the rise in the earnings may not always remain constant, and that the website should continue to look out for inorganic links and seek to improve quality and user experience.

Good Times are Back

Just as traffic to the website began to improve, it was hit again. The reason was a 301 redirect made from one of the websiteâ€™s old pages. Once that was removed, the website resumed its upward trend.

So it was a happy ending after all. They had dealt with the perfect storm and good times are back, all thanks to the efforts of their reliable SEO partner. If you are hit by a similar storm, donâ€™t lose heart – quality SEO services can help you bounce back.